Industry and Immigration

1. Industry and Immigration Ch. 15

2. New Industry • Electric Age – refers to the transformation of factory work and city life by the inventions of new technology. • Factory work • Steam engine • Better transportation systems

3. City Life • Electric lights • Appliances • Ready-made clothing • Store bought food (packaging)

4. Most useful invention was in 1876, when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. • His success hit Germany, Austria, Great Britain, France, and the United States first. • By 1914, General Electric (GE) produced 85% of the world’s light bulbs.

5. Corporations • Association with legal rights and liabilities separate from those of its members. • Became a significant factor with the growth of railroads in the 1850’s. • Main feature of a corporation is the separation between ownership and management.

6. Corporations stimulated technological change as they looked for ways to increase production and speed, improve product quality, and lower costs. • More jobs opened up and were available to foreigners.

7. Factory Life • Job conditions were often very dangerous. • Factory workers worked on average ten hours a day, six days a week, with little to no benefits. • Workers lived as close to factories as they could to reduce travel time.

8. Immediate Benefits • Creates jobs, enriches nation, encourages technological progress. • Education expands, clothing cheaper, healthier diet and housing improved. • Workers eventually win shorter hours, better wages and conditions.

9. Sweatshops – small, poorly ventilated shops or apartments crammed with workers, often family members, who pieced together garments.

10. Child Labor • Common in garment making and other industries. • Children as young as six worked in factories; many are injured. • To keep children awake, mill supervisors beat them

12. Working Women • 85 percent of wage earning women were unmarried and under the age of 25. • Typical female factory worker earned $6 a day. • Some working class women turned to prostitution.

13. Most Americans believed that a women’s proper role was to care for her home and family. • Stereotypes reinforced notion that working women were promiscuous. • Sexual harassment at work was rarely punished.

14. Poverty and Wealth • Many working families only had one parent due to work related accidents and deaths. • Those plagued by poverty were forced to live in tenements, four to six story residential dwellings with little to no ventilation or light.

16. Hull House was a popular settlement in Chicago that was a residence for working immigrants. • Jane Addams founded the Hull House in 1889.

17. New Immigrants • Between 1870 to 1910 over 20 million immigrants came to the United States. • European Immigrants entered through Ellis Island (New York City). • Chinese and Japanese Immigrants entered through Angel Island (San Francisco Bay).

18. Ellis Island

21. This scenario was far different for "steerage" or third class passengers. These immigrants traveled in crowded and often unsanitary conditions near the bottom of steamships with few amenities, often spending up to two weeks seasick in their bunks during rough Atlantic Ocean crossings. Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection. 

22. If the immigrant's papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these "six second physicals." By 1916, it was said that a doctor could identify numerous medical conditions (ranging from anemia to goiters to varicose veins) just by glancing at an immigrant. The ship's manifest log (that had been filled out back at the port of embarkation) contained the immigrant's name and his/her answers to twenty-nine questions. This document was used by the legal inspectors at Ellis Island to cross examine the immigrant during the legal (or primary) inspection. The two agencies responsible for processing immigrants at Ellis Island were the United States Public Health Service and the Bureau of Immigration (later known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service - INS).

23. Angel Island

24. Like people of other ethnicities, the Chinese immigrated to the United States for better lives. Before 1900, their work included farming, mining and building railroads. Men sent money home to their families in China. • But American laborers resented the Chinese because the latter were willing to work for cheap wages. Americans accused the Chinese of monopolizing jobs.

25. Stiff immigration laws were passed. Many Chinese immigrants were forced to prove they had a husband or father who was a U. S. citizen or be deported. • From 1910-1940, Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated at Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco Bay. U.S. officials hoped to deport as many as possible by asking obscure questions about Chinese villages and family histories that immigrants would have trouble answering correctly.

26. Men and women were housed separately. Detainees spent much of their time in the barracks, languishing between interrogations. • The immigrants expressed their fears and frustrations through messages and poems written or carved into barrack walls. Some poems are still visible at the museum today. • Immigrants were detained weeks, months, sometimes even years. Word got back to China about the prolonged questioning, so people would try to mentally prepare before even crossing the Pacific Ocean.

27. Chain Migration • Chain migration- occurs when a migrant chooses a destination and write, calls, or communicates through other to tell family and friends at home about the new place. • Chains of migration built upon each other create immigration waves– swells in migration from one origin to the same destination.

28. Pull factors- are the circumstances that effectively attract the migrant to certain locales from other places—the decision of where to go. • Pull factors tend to be vaguer and may depend solely on perceptions construed from things heard and read rather than on experiences in the destination place.

29. Push factors- are the conditions and perceptions that help the migrant decide to leave a place. • Push factors include individual considerations such as work, or retirement conditions, cost of living, personal safety and security, and, for many environmental catastrophes or even issues like weather and climate.

30. Maintaining Cultural Traditions • Religious and communal institutions played a key role in maintaining immigrants’ cultural traditions. • Churches were often the focal point of immigrants life. • The family was the most important institution in Chinese and Japanese communities.

31. Ethnic neighborhoods- a tightly- knit place to practice customs, within a major city. • A culture having their own ethnic neighborhood enables members of a local culture in an urban area to set themselves apart and practice their customs.

32. New York City Ethnic Neighborhoods… • Chinatown • Astoria (Greek) • Crown Heights (Jews) • Koreatown • Little Italy • Sunnyside (Irish) • Spanish Harlem

33. Ethnic Neighborhoods in San Francisco… • Chinatown • Japantown • Little Saigon (Chinese-Vietnamese) • Diamond Heights (Pakistani) • Little Russia

34. What is nativism? • Anti-foreign prejudice of Americans. • Nativism led to the creation of the Naturalization Act of 1870 • Limited citizenship to “white persons and persons of African descent.” • Act intended to ban Chinese from becoming citizens.

35. Chinese Exclusions Act of 1882 made the Chinese the only group that could NOT emigrate freely to the United States.

36. Great Migration • Mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the Urban North. • By the 1900’s roughly 90% of the black population still lived in the South. • Blacks look for more opportunity in the North.

38. The New Middle Class • Salespeople, managers, civil servants, technicians, bank tellers, insurance agents, etc. • By 1910, middle class lived in “all-electric homes,” with indoor plumbing, clocks, electric razors, vacuum cleaners, and telephones. • Transportation included trolleys and trains.

39. Coney Island was the most popular theme park.